...on the very day when Hester Prynne first wore her ignominious badge,

Nathaniel Hawthorne -- The Scarlet Letter

And so within five minutes of their invasion they were in ignominious retreat by the same way as they had come, with a flock of geese hissing after them and pecking at their calves all the way.

George Orwell -- Animal Farm

For this reason I propose to dismiss him, to dismiss him with ignominy from the post he has held in this Centre;

Aldous Huxley -- Brave New World

Show more

How ignominious to be strapped to this ponderous mass of paper, print and dead man’s sentiment.

Cornelia Funke -- Inkheart

Ignominy in ransom and free pardonAre of two houses; lawful mercyIs nothing kin to foul redemption.

William Shakespeare -- Measure for Measure

Thy ignominy sleep with thee in the grave

William Shakespeare -- Henry IV, Part 1

The omission threw her back to some ignominious spot at the Circle, some plebeian place of being a spokeswoman, a public shill.

Dave Eggers -- The Circle

I knew that twenty or even thirty or more would visit each one of them, and that the resulting insult would be horribly painful and ignominious.

Chang-rae Lee -- A Gesture Life

Kate shouted back, then whispered to Reynie, "Actually, ’ignominious’ is the word I don’t know."

Trenton Lee Stewart -- The Mysterious Benedict Society

Show more again

After a few minutes of fruitless troubleshooting, the teams had to ignominiously haul their robots out of the water by the tether.

Joshua Davis -- Spare Parts

The ultimate ignominy came the day Father set the astronomical clock by the radio.

Corrie Ten Boom -- The Hiding Place

This had been an ignominious copulation.

William Styron -- Sophie’s Choice

Lacking both ability and interest, the pony had come to a dead stop at the fence, tossing young Hamish over his head, over the fence, and ignominiously into a nettle patch on the other side.

Diana Gabaldon -- Outlander

And in the midst of our dying, as we rise from the organic and sink back ignominiously into the organic, it is a glory and a privilege to love what Death doesn’t touch.

Donna Tartt -- The Goldfinch

In the fall of 1943, for unknown reasons, Watanabe was transferred to the military’s most ignominious station for NCOs, a POW camp.

Laura Hillenbrand -- Unbroken

Three minutes’ delay will render it involuntary and ignominious.

Emily Bronte -- Wuthering Heights

Listen to me, rather than add to my destruction, rather than add to my ignominy!

Alexandre Dumas -- The Three Musketeers

Justine also was a girl of merit and possessed qualities which promised to render her life happy; now all was to be obliterated in an ignominious grave, and I the cause!

Mary Shelley -- Frankenstein

But you wouldn’t withstand other pressures and you’d fall just as ignominiously.

Ayn Rand -- Atlas Shrugged

But she thrust him ignominiously away and behind her.

Jack London -- White Fang

The punishment seemed to me in a high degree ignominious, especially for so great a girl — she looked thirteen or upwards.

Charlotte Bronte -- Jane Eyre

"Brevet," said the President, "you have undergone an ignominious sentence, and you cannot take an oath."

Victor Hugo -- Les Miserables

The shop-boys in the neighbourhood had long been in the habit of branding Noah in the public streets, with the ignominious epithets of ’leathers,’

Charles Dickens -- Oliver Twist

But one thing which stands by innocence, is the love of God; for were we to suffer disgrace, nay, an ignominious death itself, what consolation does our innocence procure at our latest conflict, our last moments!

Daniel Defoe -- Robinson Crusoe

There was a huge, giddy crowd of men who were avid for any diversion, but the cat turned chicken the moment Yossarian released him and fled from Hungry Joe ignominiously like a yellow dog.

Joseph Heller -- Catch-22

One human being had seemed to love him and he had denied her life and happiness: he had sentenced her to ignominy, a death of shame.

James Joyce -- Dubliners

It’s an absurd as well as an ignominious position.

Margaret Atwood -- The Handmaid’s Tale

And I soon found myself getting heavily bumped from behind in the nape of the neck and the small of the back, and having my face ignominiously shoved against the kitchen wall, because I did not answer those questions at sufficient length.

Charles Dickens -- Great Expectations

He had died ignominiously and swiftly of pneumonia, following measles, without ever having gotten any closer to the Yankees than the camp in South Carolina.

Margaret Mitchell -- Gone with the Wind

May you all rot away to earth and water, sitting tight, safe in your ignominy! I will myself tie on a breastplate with him.

Homer -- The Iliad

With any other man I should have flown outright into a dreadful passion, scorned all further words, and thrust him ignominiously from my presence.

Herman Melville -- Bartleby, the Scrivener: a Story of Wall Street

The treasurer and admiral insisted that you should be put to the most painful and ignominious death, by setting fire to your house at night, and the general was to attend with twenty thousand men, armed with poisoned arrows, to shoot you on the face and hands.

Jonathan Swift -- Gulliver’s Travels

But like Czar Peter content to toil in the shipyards of foreign cities, Queequeg disdained no seeming ignominy, if thereby he might happily gain the power of enlightening his untutored countrymen.

Herman Melville -- Moby Dick

The next night he was waylaid just outside Paris by the valets of Marquis de St. Cyr, and ignominiously thrashed—thrashed like a dog within an inch of his life—because he had dared to raise his eyes to the daughter of the aristocrat.

Baroness Orczy -- The Scarlet Pimpernel

The tent, illumined by a candle, glowed warmly in the midst of the white plain; and when he, as a matter of course, entered it, both Perrault and Francois bombarded him with curses and cooking utensils, till he recovered from his consternation and fled ignominiously into the outer cold.

Jack London -- The Call of the Wild

Our excitement had been wound to so high a pitch, that the discovery was quite a shock, and we felt half angry with the creature who had disappointed us; then the absurdity of the whole thing made us laugh heartily, and calling off the dogs, the old lady was released from her ignominious position.

Johann Wyss -- The Swiss Family Robinson

Dum-bledore, who had always suspected him; Dumbledore, dead on his orders; Dumbledore, whose wand was his now, yet who reached out from the ignominy of death through the boy, the boy — But surely if the boy had destroyed any of his Horcruxes, he, Lord Voldemort, would have known, would have felt it?

J.K. Rowling -- Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

She would be scolded, abused, ignominiously discharged.

Theodore Dreiser -- Sister Carrie

But, no; on reflection, the procureur was not a merciless man; and it was not the magistrate, slave to his duties, but the friend, the loyal friend, who roughly but firmly cut into the very core of the corruption; it was not the executioner, but the surgeon, who wished to withdraw the honor of Danglars from ignominious association with the disgraced young man they had presented to the world as their son-in-law.

Alexandre Dumas -- The Count of Monte Cristo

Heaven be praised, no one had heard her cry that ignominious cry, stop pain, stop!

Virginia Woolf -- To the Lighthouse

Anyway she succeeded in completely re-establishing Dounia’s reputation and the whole ignominy of this affair rested as an indelible disgrace upon her husband, as the only person to blame, so that I really began to feel sorry for him; it was really treating the crazy fellow too harshly.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky -- Crime and Punishment

A bitter sense of wrong and the thought of Jenny Snow helped her to bear it, and, taking the ignominious place, she fixed her eyes on the stove funnel above what now seemed a sea of faces, and stood there, so motionless and white that the girls found it hard to study with that pathetic figure before them.

Louisa May Alcott -- Little Women

Ignominy, Want, Despair, and Madness, have, collectively or separately, been the attendants of my career.

Charles Dickens -- David Copperfield

But to achieve this aim it is necessary that you should add your efforts and should, if possible, forget the misfortunes you have suffered, should entertain the hope of a less cruel fate, should be certain that inevitable and ignominious death awaits those who make any attempt on your persons or on what remains of your property, and finally that you should not doubt that these will be safeguarded, since such is the will of the greatest and most just of monarchs.

Leo Tolstoy -- War and Peace

But another law had placed her where she must commit her crime or starve with her child—and before God that law is responsible for both her crime and her ignominious death!

Mark Twain -- A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court

It was as if his precocity of crookedness (and every vulgar villain is precocious) had for once deceived him, and the man he had sought to entrap as a simpleton had, through his very simplicity, ignominiously baffled him.

Herman Melville -- Billy Budd

Last of all was the confusing General Section, its name alone suggesting the vagueness of its functions, where problems that had not been solved elsewhere in the company went to die an ignominious death.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez -- Love in the Time of Cholera

Meantime tea was to be brought in by the cook, and the two naughty children were to have theirs in an ignominious manner in the kitchen.

George Eliot -- The Mill on the Floss

To be beaten seemed to be infinitely better than to be thus hurled ignominiously aside.